Networking services have become increasingly important in today's society. Certain services, functions, or capabilities may be provided to a group of end users or to clients based on a corresponding source profile or policy. Devices or components within a network must generally be able to identify such a profile or policy before offering selected enhanced services, functions, or capabilities to a targeted group of end users. Accordingly, sufficient information must be made available at various networking devices in order to allow for an accurate identification of a client or a source.
In some environments, ‘compatibility’ poses an issue for network operators and system designers because entities or components in the network generally understand only a specific type of signaling in the context of offering a quality of service level. A given component or entity may process such signaling information and then communicate to another component a level of quality of service that should be applied for that communication session or flow. However, certain quality of service features may be unobtainable for an end user because they fail to conform to an accepted or recognized signaling platform (e.g. session initiation protocol (SIP)). This may be true for diverse pieces of network equipment or legacy systems that are limited in the signaling that is used to accommodate their applications. Additionally, with the current SIP based Internet multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture, it may be necessary for devices to handle the mapping between application level quality of service (QoS) and bearer level QoS. This may pose a problem for mobile operators offering services to maintain consistency across millions of handsets from different handset vendors. Accordingly, the ability to provide a mechanism that is capable of recognizing multiple types of signaling in the context of offering a selected quality of service presents a significant challenge to network administrators, component manufacturers, and system designers.